1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical disc drive and a recording method, which are capable of changing recording conditions to obtain high recording quality.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the conventional system which sets recording conditions based on the information stored in media, high recording quality is not necessarily obtained because of the different recording characteristics caused by the difference in hardware such as an optical head.
Even in a system which designs recording conditions suitable for a recording medium having a unique ID, when designing a drive, high recording quality is not necessarily obtained in all drives in mass production because of the difference in the characteristics of each drive.
It is thus difficult to control variations in the recording quality. In addition, there is another problem of ensuring a memory area to store recording conditions for each medium.
Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2004-355727 discloses the technique which executes test recording in a certain write strategy and corrects the write strategy according to a reproducing signal in the test recording, in order to obtain high recording quality.
The paragraph 0089 of the above document states “PCA (Power Calibration Area) may be used for optical discs, such as CD-R and DVD-R, for example, and a part or all of data recording area may be used for an optical disc based on the Z-CLV recording system”.
However, in the method of the above Application, in order to detect the difference in various set parameters in each strategy, it is necessary to make test recording of any one of the following patterns for detecting the difference in various set parameters of each strategy, by using different two kinds of strategies.    Reproducing pattern consisting of fixed length pit, fixed length land, and variable length pit    Reproducing pattern consisting of variable length pit, fixed length land, and fixed length pit    Reproducing pattern consisting of variable length land, fixed length land, and fixed length land    Reproducing pattern consisting of fixed length land, fixed length pit, and variable length land
However, in discs of CD-R and DVD-R standards, test recording area exists only in the innermost or outermost periphery of a disc, and test recording is impossible in a user data area occupying most area of the inner to outer tracks, and correction of strategy is difficult.
Further, even if test recording pattern is not the above specific pattern but a user data pattern, a recording quality may become not to be reproduced if a strategy is not optimized before recording. Thus, test recording in a user data area is difficult in CD-R and DVD-R discs.